


That Day Is Done

by Lapsed_Scholar



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Death, Episode: 08e16 Three Words, Episode: s08e14 This is Not Happening, Episode: s08e15 DeadAlive, F/M, Funerals, PTSD, some hope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 08:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10850025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lapsed_Scholar/pseuds/Lapsed_Scholar
Summary: Vignettes on death and resurrection





	1. Heritage

She’d been here before with him, once, she thinks dizzily. Raleigh, North Carolina, in a funeral parlor.

His mother, that time. He’d been numb and quiet, but capable. She’d been emotional support.

He had declined the embalming, the work of the mortician. Just shook his head silently, but resolutely. “Heritage” was all he’d said when pressed, and the funeral director looked at him a little strangely since he had arranged for a Protestant minister.

He’d insisted so resolutely on the autopsy, but that was different, she supposed. He had been certain she’d find something.

It was a heritage that he never really brought up beyond an occasional glancing comment or a few jokes about his nose. But one passed through the mother’s line, all the same.

~

When it’s her turn to make the arrangements, she declines the autopsy. They won’t find anything—at least nothing that will bring him back to her, and this is all that matters to her in that moment. She doesn’t want a catalogue of the horrors he endured.

She also declines the embalming, although they do give her the option to try. He’d been dead for two days before they found him, but it’s been cold: outside and in the morgue. They do clean him up, as she requests, and then they try to warn her away. She insists.

_(She’s a pathologist for God’s sake: Why do they think she doesn’t understand what she’ll be looking at? They appeal to Doggett, because appealing to Doggett is everyone’s new go-to when she’s being an irrational woman, and he tries, gently, “It’s not the same; you know it won’t be the same,” and she snaps, “I did his mother’s autopsy, for fuck’s sake!” and now the morticians are really staring. Skinner eventually intervenes on her behalf, and she’s grateful enough that she bites back the resentment that she’s suddenly become a woman who needs men to make decisions for her. Isn’t widowhood traditionally the time when women escape this sort of thing instead of falling into it?)_

He is, by far, not in the worst shape she’s seen, but seeing him like this is the worst thing she’s ever seen by far. She smooths his hair, strokes his face. She rests her head on his cold chest and cries and cries. She wonders if tears count as any sort of purification.

The casket lid is closed, but it’s a lined casket. He’s buried in a suit by the same Protestant minister, and she doesn't tear her clothes.

She won’t permit his body to be alone until it’s over. She keeps watch, sitting in the morgue and the refrigerated storage room of the funeral parlor. She recites Psalms: repeats them in her head, mouths them wordlessly, whispers them softly to herself. They comfort her a little. Doggett and Skinner take turns relieving her—she refuses to leave otherwise. (She won't tell him this. Skinner will.)

~

He’ll laugh about it later (years later). Not an actual laugh, but a small, wry chuckle. “I suppose it’s good you didn’t have me cremated. You know, Scully, Jewish heritage doesn’t often end up saving people; it’s usually the other way around.”

She’ll respond with a kiss to the tip of his nose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter inspired by the reflection, "Huh, I guess Scully didn't go for autopsy and embalming."


	2. Lazarus

Lazarus was in the tomb for four days.

He’d been buried for three months. He’d been lost for three months before that.

He doesn’t remember being dead. He’s starting to remember parts of being lost, and that’s quite sufficient for him. Memories close in on him, and he finds himself beset suddenly by shaking, unable to breathe, an uncontrollable, creeping panic. It’s worse at night. He sleeps alone because he can’t bring himself to inflict this on her, is terrified that he’ll wake up with a mind that isn’t his own and visions that aren’t real and hurt her. He doesn’t tell her because he doesn’t want to add to her pain. (He knows how much pain his reticence has _already_ caused her, but he doesn’t know how to break his silence. He used to hate how she’d hold herself aloof from him—stoic and alone in her suffering.)

It’s not that he’s stopped loving her. He loves her. (If Fox Mulder believes in a universal invariant at all, it’s that he loves Dana Scully, whether he’s alive or dead or in the pain-lit twilight between.) But he thinks it might’ve been better if he’d stayed dead. And how is he supposed to tell her that? He’s seen the way she looks at him, in gut-wrenching relief and terrible love. She’d think it a betrayal, and he’s not entirely sure it wouldn’t be.

He also loves her child in the abstract way that he can—and it’s his child, too, right? It seems impossible, but that’s _actually_ the simplest, most straightforward answer, isn’t it? But he can’t quite bring himself to believe it. (And he used to believe in everything, even miracles.) He’d been dying, deteriorating slowly, pain starting to cloud his everyday reality, and he was coming to the realization that he was going to have to give up, and he was going to have to tell Scully (and why the hell hadn’t he just told her in the first place?); then he’d spent months knowing nothing but pain and horror in what could have been hell, but apparently wasn’t because he’d finally drifted into the release of unknowing death.

And then he’d woken up to discover that he was safe and healed (if weak and scarred), with the love of his life sobbing in relief at his bedside. Their child, the child that she had so fervently longed for (that he hadn’t allowed himself to long for) is growing within her, and he’s suddenly in possession of more miracles than he knows how to process.

And an utterly shattered psyche. That, too.

Most people have nine months to come to terms with their impending parenthood, but he already has something of an unusual situation, and he really wishes he had not started the clock missing and dead. How is he supposed to prepare for this? How is he supposed to support her, or care for an entirely new, helpless person when he’s lost the ability to function as himself?

~

Walter Skinner saves him again, though this time more deliberately.

_(No one has really told him, but he’s managed to piece together that Skinner insisted on digging him up, and then saved him again by accident when he was trying to spare Scully from a sadistic game of Krycek’s. Scully hadn’t wanted to talk about it; she was too drained and grateful, and she had spent most of the time that he was in the hospital draped over him. She would rest her cheek on his chest: listening to his heart, he suspected. He had still been on very good painkillers and heavy antivirals at that point, blessedly dreamless and devoid of memory, mostly bemused and stunned._

_He did get a brief chance to talk to Skinner alone. Scully had been temporarily and reluctantly summoned away for some pregnancy-related check or another. It still overwhelmed him to see her pregnant._

_Skinner had mollified her by promising to stay with him. Mulder had tried to reassure her, gentle teasing and a crooked smile. “I’m not going anywhere from this bed, Scully. I’m pretty sure with the number of monitors you’ve got on me, I’d set off so many alarms that you’d know about it before I even made the floor.” In truth, he wasn’t entirely sure he could stand right now, much less walk, but he spared her what she probably already knew._

_Skinner had sat dutifully beside him, watched Scully go. Then, when she was out of earshot, turned back to Mulder. “You know, she would never leave you alone after we...found you, either. Just sat in the morgue until John or I convinced her that we could handle it for a few hours.” He shook his head. “She’ll be pissed if she finds out that I told you...but you should know.”_

_Mulder swallowed hard, closed his eyes. It didn’t surprise him, but it did pain him._

_Skinner continued, sighing, looking down at his clasped hands. “I wish I could say that I did a better job the last time you both entrusted me to watch your back, Mulder. I’m surprised either of you still want me to do it.”_

_Mulder turned his head in the bed to fully look at Skinner. His voice was hoarse from lack of use; teasing Scully before she left had been the most he’d spoken since he woke up. “You know, even I didn’t consider that outcome. I thought they wanted Scully—it was all I could see, and the terror of it blinded me to other possibilities. I probably...wasn’t at my sharpest, mentally.” A rueful smile. “But I don’t think there’s anything you could have done to prevent it.”_

_Skinner hadn’t been done with the apologies. He looked like he was trying to find some way to broach the subject. Sighed, shifted his jaw. “Look, Mulder, about...”_

_Mulder waved his hand dismissively (it shook a little). “I really should thank you for not leaving me in the ground. And I know about Krycek,” looked directly into Skinner’s eyes, “I know all_ about _Krycek. And...t_ _hank you. For making the choice for me that I would have made. I could never ask for more than that.”)_

~

When Skinner comes to see him at his apartment, late in the evening, Mulder answers the door wearing just lounge pants. Only one person calls on him at this hour, and there is enough time for his stomach to lurch and for him to try to work out what the hell he is going to say to her before he opens the door to see Skinner. He’s simultaneously relieved at not having to try to shield her from himself at this hour and annoyed at the intrusion. He contemplates just closing the door in his boss’s face, but he’s too exhausted to fight about it. Instead he just walks away, leaves the door open. Gestures at the living room over his shoulder, while walking into the bedroom. “Have a seat; let me go slip into something less comfortable.” The words sound like his, but the tone is unfamiliarly sharp and brittle.

When he comes back, clad in jeans and a t-shirt, Mulder is not any more polite. And it’s not even the light, insouciant impoliteness at which he used to excel. He’s exhausted and angry, and he’s expecting a lecture on how much Scully loves him, as if that had somehow escaped his notice. He’s underestimated the man now sitting across from him, though. If anyone understands PTSD from violence and trauma and death and near-death, it’s Walter Skinner. And Skinner has never left an agent behind.

~

Mulder might have physically recovered, but his mind is far from all right. This is terribly apparent to Scully, as close as the two of them have always been, but Skinner can see it, too. The haunted, faraway look in his eyes (that look is familiar; Skinner’s seen in in the mirror), his reticence to re-engage in his life, how he keeps Scully at arm’s length. He’s rougher, less kind, his characteristic impatience exaggerated, his charming humor flat and forced.

Skinner goes to see him. He knocks on the apartment door, and Mulder answers, barely dressed, hair mussed, a few days’ growth of beard. He looks terrible, despite the guarded stoicism that he’s clearly trying hard to project. He doesn’t try for too long: Skinner sees the carefully-constructed look fade, replaced by defeated exhaustion, as soon as recognition sparks in his eyes. He’d expected someone else.

“What are you doing here? What do you want?” Mulder demands, arms folded, once he’s fully dressed. He’s no longer pretending to be civil.

“I’m going to tell you a story, Agent Mulder. And you are going to listen to it.”

Mulder scoffs, disdainfully. “What, like a bedtime story? You want me to sit on your knee? I’m a little old for that, don’t you think? Save it for Scully’s kid, Uncle Walter.”

Skinner gives him a piercing look. “Just listen.”

~

By the end, Skinner is visibly shaken, but his voice remains strong. Mulder is staring fixedly at the floor, grinding his jaw, a sheen of tears over his eyes.

Skinner hasn’t told the story—the whole story and its whole aftermath—in years. He leaves nothing out. He talks about confusion and flashbacks. Of the reflex to withdraw from life and how badly he scared his family. How they so desperately wanted him back, how relieved they were to see him again, but how he doubted that he existed anymore. He talks about recovery: what finally helped and how long it took. And, at the end, he fixes Mulder with a look.

“I’m not going to pretend to know what you went through, Mulder. And I’m not even going to tell you that most people would understand it. But right now, what will matter the most is how you deal with it and how you choose to live with it. There are treatments that can help you and people who can help you. Trust me—you don’t want to do this alone.”

He leans over to set a business card on Mulder’s coffee table, then stands up, puts his hands in his coat pockets. “Calling that number would be a start. And if you ever want to talk about it, you know how to reach me.”

He leaves Mulder on the couch, still staring at the floor. He turns at the door to look back. “Good night, Agent Mulder.”

~

It’s not better right away. And as events turn out, it takes Fox Mulder years to fully return to the land of the living. But he tries. He goes to therapy. He takes SSRIs again. He allows himself to love Scully in person, instead of from far away. He remembers that they have always been each other’s best comfort and consolation.

He allows himself to think the word _father_ , even if he can’t say it out loud. And, for now, it’s enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I might be the only person in the universe who finds Mulder's reaction in "Three Words" to be understandable. I mean, it's certainly not ideal, and he definitely hurts Scully, but he's more or less acting like someone who's experienced really heavy trauma. (Which he has.)

**Author's Note:**

> H/T and apologies to Paul McCartney for the title.
> 
> I think my research for this story put me on a watchlist somewhere.


End file.
